Blog – Page 29

Note #25356

For my final bit of Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day, I’m working on improving the UI of a new upcoming feature: a spreadsheet-like page that makes it easy for administrators to edit the details of many volunteers simultaneously (all backed by the usual level of customisation and view/edit permissions that Three Rings is known for).

It’s a moderately-popular request, and I can see it being helpful to volunteer coordinators at many different types of voluntary organisation.

Don’t have time to write up the test instructions today, though, because I’ve got to wrap up my volunteering and go do some childwrangling, so that’ll do for now!

Note #25347

Even when it’s technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that… but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.

Note #25345

My Three Rings volunteering this International Volunteer Day isn’t all technical work. It’s also time to process the incoming postal mail.

Our time as volunteers may be free, but our servers aren’t, so the larger and richer charities that use our services help contribute to our hosting costs. Most send money digitally, but some use dual-signatory accounts that require they send cheques.

Note #25343

As well as the programming tasks I’m working on for Three Rings this International Volunteer Day, I’m also doing a little devops. We’ve got a new server architecture rolling out next week, and I’m tasked with ensuring that the logging on them meets our security standards.

Each server’s on-device logs are retained in date-stamped files for 14 days, but they’re also backed-up offsite daily.

Those bits all seem to be working, so next I need to work out a way to add a notification to our monitoring platform if any server doesn’t successfully push a log to the offsite backup in a timely manner.

Note #25341

Not every code review is fireworks, but most Three Rings changes come from the actual needs of the voluntary organisations that Three Rings supports. Some of our users were confused by the way the Admin > Roles page was laid out, so one of our volunteers wrote an improved version.

And because we’re all about collaboration, discussion, learning from one another, and volunteer-empowerment… I’ve added a minor suggestion… but approved their change “with or without” it. I trust my fellow volunteer to either accept my suggestion (if it’s right), reject it (if it’s wrong), or solicit more reviews or bring it to Slack or our fortnightly dev meeting (if it requires discussion).

Note #25339

Good news! It turns out that the new code to fix the mail merge fields in Three Rings doesn’t introduce an inconsistency with established behaviour. It was important to check, but it turns out all is well.

I touched bases with a fellow volunteer on Slack. Three Rings volunteers primarily communicate via Slack: it helps us to work asynchronously, which supports the fact that our volunteers all have different schedules and preferences. Some might do a couple of evenings a week, others might do the odd weekend, others still might do an occasional intense solid week of volunteering with us and then nothing for months! A communication model that works both synchronously and asynchronously is really important to make that volunteering model work, and Slack fits the bill.

We get together in person sometimes, and we meet on Zoom from time to time too, but Slack is king of communication at Three Rings

Note #25337

My first task this International Volunteer Day is to test a pull request that aims to fix a bug with Three Rings’ mail merge fields functionality. As it’s planned to be a hotfix (direct into production) we require extra rigor and more reviewers than code that just goes into the main branch for later testing on our beta environment.

My concern is that fixing this bug might lead to a regression not described by our automated tests, so I’m rolling back to a version from a couple of months ago to compare the behaviour of the affected tool then and now. Sometimes you just need some hands-on testing!

Note #25334

Happy International Volunteer Day! Volunteering rocks.

As I’m on sabbatical, I’m in the lucky position of being able to spend most of the day on a volunteer project very close to my heart: Three Rings. Three Rings is a 22-year-old web-based service produced by volunteers, for volunteers. The software service we produce supports the efforts of around 60,000 volunteers working at charities and other voluntary organisations around the globe.

I’ll be posting throughout the day about some of the different tasks I take on. My volunteer role with Three Rings is primarily a developer/devops one, but it takes all sorts to make a project like this work (even if my posts look biased towards the technical stuff)!

But first: coffee.

A Friend Used AI to Wish me Happy Birthday

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

“I was sincere! I wanted to tell you happy Birthday but I wanted to have AI do it.”

“Why?” I shot back, instantly annoyed.

“Because I didn’t know how to make it lengthy. Plus, it’s just easier.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. I just sat there, stunned. The last sentence repeating itself in my head.

It’s just easier. It’s just easier. It’s. Just. Easier.

…

Robert Kingett

Robert shares his experience of receiving a birthday greeting from a friend, that had clearly been written by an AI. The friend’s justification was because they’d wanted to make the message longer, more easily. But the end result was a sour taste in the recipient’s mouth.

There’s a few things wrong here. First is the assumption by the greeting’s author (and perhaps a reflection on society in general) that a longer message automatically implies more care and consideration than a shorter one. But that isn’t necessarily true (and it certainly doesn’t extend to artificially stretching a message, like you’re being paid by the word or something).

A second problem was falling back on the AI for this task in the first place. If you want to tell somebody you’re thinking of them, tell somebody you’re thinking of them. Putting an LLM between you and then introduces an immediate barrier: like telling your personal assistant to tell your friend that you’re thinking of them. It weakens the connection.

And by way of a slippery slope, you can imagine (and the technology has absolutely been there for some time now) a way of hooking up your calendar so that an AI would automatically send a birthday greeting to each of your friends, when their special day comes around, perhaps making reference to the last thing they wrote online or the last message they sent to you, by way of personalisation. By which point: why bother having friends at all? Just stick with the AI, right? It’s just easier.

Ugh.

Needless to say: like Robert, I’d far rather you just said a simple “happy birthday” than asked a machine to write me a longer, more seemingly-thoughtful message. I care more about humans than about words.

(It’s not my birthday for another month, mind.)

Babies and Baubles

For a long time now, every year we’ve encouraged our two children (now 10 and 8 years old) to each select one new bauble for our Christmas tree¹. They get to do this at the shop adjoining the place from which we buy the tree, and it’s become a part of our annual Christmas traditions.

This approach to decoration: ad-hoc, at the whims of growing children, and spread across many years without any common theme or pattern, means that our tree is decorated in a way that might be generously described as eclectic. Or might less-generously be described as malcoordinated!

But there’s something beautiful about a deliberately-constructed collection of disparate and disconnected parts.

I’m friends with a couple, for example, who’ve made a collection of the corks from the wine bottles from each of their anniversary celebrations, housed together into a strange showcase. There might be little to connect one bottle to the next, and to an outsider a collection of used stoppers might pass as junk, but for them – as for us – the meaning comes as a consequence of the very act of collecting.

Each ornament is an untold story. A story of a child wandering around the shelves of a Christmas-themed store, poking fingerprints onto every piece of glass they can find as they weigh up which of the many options available to them is the most special to them this year.

And every year, at about this time, they get to relive their past tastes and fascinations as we pull out the old cardboard box and once again decorate our family’s strangely beautiful but mismatched tree.

It’s pretty great.

Footnotes

¹ Sometimes each has made a bauble or similar decoration at their school or nursery, too. “One a year” isn’t a hard rule. But the key thing is, we’ve never since their births bought a set of baubles.

kirby vs. this blog post

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

mgx

A cute use of Javascript to make a fun post more-fun, helping to keep the Internet fun and weird.

I want to do more crap like this.

But meanwhile, I should show this post to my 8-year-old, who recently finished playing through a Kirby game and won’t stop talking about it. He might appreciate it, but perhaps in a different way to me.

Cooking with Wine

TFW a recipe calls for a glass of wine but you can’t get the cork back in the bottle so you just have to drink the rest of it.

Ah well, what’s a chef to do? 🤷🍷

Morning, Sheep

Not quite ready for wintering indoors, our village’s hardy sheep are enjoying pasturing in the large field near the school this beautiful but chilly morning.

99 Days of Blogging

With this post, for the first time ever¹, I’ve blogged for 99 consecutive days!²

Calendar showing Sunday 25 August through Sunday 1 December inclusive, with a coloured "spot" on each day with a size corresponding to the number of posts made on that day, broken into a pie chart showing the proportion of different post kinds. — The dots are sized based on the number of posts and broken-down by post kind: **articles** are blue, **notes** are green, **checkins** are orange, **reposts** are purple, and **replies** are red³.

I didn’t set out with the aim of getting to a hundred⁴, as I might well manage tomorrow, but after a while I began to think it a real possibility. In particular, when a few different factors came together:

Kicking off my first sabbatical gave me lots of free time, and although I’ve mostly filled it with voluntary work and travel, there’s been a greater-than-usual amount of blogging (often about those two things!) too.
Posting a daily photo of my bleppy dog for the month of ~~September~~ Bleptember provided an early boost.
Travel’s given me more opportunity for geocaching (and, this last week, geohashing), as reflected in my copious checkin logs for that period.
Earlier this year, inspired by Clayton Errington, I came up with a process to streamline my mobile blogging “flow”⁵. I now use a custom Progressive Web App to provide a better interface for quickly posting on-the-move to one or both of this blog and my personal Mastodon account, which I tested heavily during Bleptember.

Previous long streaks have sometimes been aided by pre-writing posts in bulk and then scheduling them to come out one-a-day⁶. I mostly don’t do that any more: when a post is “ready”, it gets published.

I didn’t want to make a “this is my 100th day of consecutive blogging” on the 100th day. That attaches too much weight to the nice round number. But I wanted to post to acknowledge that I’m going to make it to 100 days of consecutive blogging… so long as I can think of something worth saying tomorrow. I guess we’ll all have to wait and see.

Footnotes

¹ Given that I’ve been blogging for over 26 years, that I’m still finding noteworthy blogging “firsts” is pretty cool, I think

² My previous record “streak” was only 37 days, so there’s quite a leap there.

³ A massive 219 posts are represented over the last 99 days: that’s an average of over 2 a day!

⁴ This isn’t an attempt at #100DaysToOffload; I already achieved that this year as it does not require consecutive days. But it’s a cool challenge anyway.

⁵ My site’s backed by WordPress, but the mobile wp-admin isn’t the best and my site’s so-customised that apps like Jetpack mangle my metadata.

⁶ As you might now, I consider myself to be the primary audience for my blog: everybody else comes second. That’s why I don’t collect any webstats! When I used to collect webstats, I would sometimes pre-write and “schedule” posts, but without them it just feels pointless to do so!

Disarmed

In good news, my injured arm is not broken and should recover within a couple of weeks.

In amusing news, the doctor who treated me recognised me from (tales of) my electric shock admission earlier in the year, even though she never treated me on that ocassion.